Last night I cooked mildly spicy turkey and peppers with rice for a party of six: Manuel, Mike, Hadi, Indro, Chiara and myself.

I didn’t really get into the mood for cooking for once; I mean, I do normally get panicky and a bit too hyper, but I wasn’t yesterday. Just rather uninterested. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to cook for my friends. I was the one who thought of it (for once). It just wasn’t very interesting for me. I felt like I was just going through the motions.

Yet, for the first time, everything went right with the actual cooking process itself. The rice was perfectly cooked, the meat tender and well-marinated. Timing was flawless. Ten minutes ahead of my deadline, in fact. I guess there’s trouble when you start giving yourself deadlines for simple things like cooking a meal.

After dinner, us men headed to Indro’s for a movie while Chiara went back to her room to pack for her vacation. Lucky girl. Also, she apparently made the photoshoot for the university’s calendar. Miss Chemistry or something, holding up tubes of mysterious bubbling fluids. Good for her.

Indro’s room was an entirety by itself. For a dorm room, it looked pretty permanent, like my room back home with the shelves upon shelves of CDs and the sofa and the 22′ monitor and, well, you get the idea. It was cool. He handed Mike and I a book titled “Xenophobe’s Guide to Italy”. Here’s an extract:

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La Dolce Vita
The Italians live life to the full, and do not feel in the least bit guilty leading a life of leisure and pleasure twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. This is what life is all about: Italians do not live to work, they work to live.

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Brilliant. I suggest you buy the book today, especially if you’re Italian, cuz while it’s written tongue-in-cheek, Indro assures me that a lot of it’s actually truer than you would believe.

Then we went through Indro’s extensive movie collection (that got Hadi positively salivating) before settling on “A Clockwork Orange”. I must say that this movie is absolutely magnificent. Together with “Full Metal Jacket”, it completely makes up for “Eyes Wide Shut” and “The Shining” (which, yes, yes, I know the rest of the world, other than Stephen King himself and I, loves and adores as a bloody classic).

The violence was lovely, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as funny, for a Kubrick film, I mean. No one speaks like a normal person in this film. It is much faster-paced too, than most of his other movies, which admittedly can really drag. One thing for sure, I’ll never feel the same listening to “Singing in the Rain” again …

This reminds me: I miss British films and TV series from the 70′s. I would die for an episode of “The Avengers” right now. Mmm… Mrs. Emma Peel. I loved her name. I mean we all wanted to peel off her catsuit like an orange, didn’t we?

Well, those of us who lived in the 70′s that is.

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Copyright © 2002 Kenny Mah Ying Fye.